A New Schedule (Also, Google)

Two things: first, today’s post is going to be broken up into two sections: section one will be some basic housekeeping stuff, and section two will be about the results of a recent experiment of mine.

So, I move back to Norman on August 19th. When I get back, I’m going to have several responsibilities. Obviously, I’ll have classes to attend. That will eat up a fair amount of my afternoon, especially when you account for the increasing homework load as the semester progresses.

I also compete on a team in a program called Ethics Bowl, and researching/practicing for that will probably take up a fair amount of time when there’s a competition coming up. I’m also looking into the possibility of helping to start an organization for libertarians on campus (because I haven’t yet been able to find one), and I might try to get in on the Econ club. Also, I’m registered for this thing called College Youth in Government that will claim some of my attention if/when the university’s chapter gets started.

On top of that, I’m leasing an apartment this year, and the rent is $400 a month. This means I’m going to need a job to keep the bills paid. I’ve already looked into jobs at the school library, and at my favorite sandwich shop (the latter having promised me an interview when I get settled in on the 19th, which I’m very excited and thankful for). Should I get hired, I’ll probably be working around 20 hours a week (full-time is obviously not doable). Moreover, I’ll be working primarily evening shifts (since I have class otherwise), though weekends are an exception to this.

Tentatively, what time remains will be my “free time”. A fair amount of this will probably be spent with friends, or reading quietly at the library. Also, I’m going to try to start working out this year, since there’s a stocked gym in the apartment complex, but I do admit that it’s going to be difficult when I get employment, since there’s really no time in the morning or afternoon, but probably less time in the evenings when I’ll have work . After being immersed in the environment for a while, I usually find a good way of streamlining everything, so I’ll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it.

You’ve probably caught on by now, but the reason I’m telling you all this is that, as my schedule continues to fill up, total time and effort I can put into the blog diminishes. In other words, I’m going to have a lot of stuff to do, so I won’t be able to maintain my “detailed posts every day” routine once I get settled in. I imagine that I’ll still probably put out 3-4 posts a week, but it will likely take me a couple of days to finish them since I’ll have so much else on my plate. I’m just warning you now so you don’t lose interest based on a decreasing post frequency. Sorry, but that’s just the way it has to be.

You’re probably still pretty sad, though, so I’ll try to pack in a bit of good content here to cheer you up. Recently, I decided to experiment with Chrome to compare its performance to long-time incumbent Firefox. I was a bit hesitant, since I’ve used Firefox for years, and have formed a pretty potent emotional attachment, but I couldn’t stay intellectually honest if I chose to dismiss Chrome without actually giving it a thorough shot. As a primer, there are a couple different benchmark tests you can read up on here and here. Here’s a sample shot of one benchmark:

Basically, though, it comes down to Chrome blowing Firefox out of the water on nearly every metric. What’s interesting are some indicators that Firefox uses less memory/can load pages faster: this hasn’t been my experience with Firefox 5. As I noted the other day, Firefox has been extremely slow for me. It lags a lot, it freezes randomly, and it ends up taking from 1,400,000-2,000,000 K in memory. Chrome opens up a new task in the task manager for each open tab, but, even when I have 20 tabs open, and am pushing a lot of memory usage, Chrome doesn’t slow down on me. This leads me to think that it wasn’t malware slowing me down, as I previously suggested: it was just the browser. Obviously, my older computer is probably to blame for some of the slowdown, but the impact likely isn’t that significant if I’m achieving vastly superior results with Chrome.

I will admit that Chrome has slowed down slightly since I got it, but this is only because I’ve loaded it up with a few extensions (something I did with Firefox, but I also deleted many of those extensions to test whether that would improve speed–it did not). The app/extension market for Chrome, by the way, may not be as massive as the market for Firefox, but I’ve found many apps of significantly higher quality in the Chrome market. Additionally, I think the UI for Chrome is much more user-friendly in this regard, which I like very much. Finally, even if it is extensions which caused the slowdown in Firefox, I’m impressed that Chrome handles similar workloads like a champ.

Here’s the last word on that debate for me. Chrome is faster, it doesn’t freeze, it has good apps whose performance it can handle, it takes up less memory, it opens faster… Look, Firefox, I know we’ve been through a lot together, and you’ve served me well in that time. But you’re just not as quick as you used to be. And I have to restart you a lot. You’re just not the same browser I eloped with. I’m glad you helped me escape internet explorer, but… I’m sorry, I’m a Chrome man now.